Very slow speeds and can't connect to work VPN (dns failure)

Hi. I am trying to work from home using my work VPN. When I try to connect to the VPN (nottshc.nhs.uk) I just get a DNS resolution failure. My work has provided me with an alternative DNS www.access.nottshc.nhs.uk this does not work either. I ran a tracert on this and found that there was timeouts/huge latency when traversing the virgin media network causing it to fail to connect/remain connected. Is there anything you can do about this?In addition to this it took 10 minutes to load these forums so I suspec there is a line or network fault as well. I am not technical so could you please test my line and/or look at the dns issues I am having?I may have to consider changing bb provider if not as I regularly need to work from home sadly. Many thanks!

Re: Very slow speeds and can't connect to work VPN (dns failure)

Hi Chewit,A warm welcome to the forums.This rather looks like an issue with your employer's IT services. nottshc.nhs.uk does not appear to have any DNS routing information what so ever... neither PlusNet's nor Google's DNS has an IP address for that URL

I hope this helps you progress the problem with your employer's IT support.You can point you IT staff to these diagnostics using this link - right click the link and choose 'copy shortcut' then paste into an email to your IT support..

Re: Very slow speeds and can't connect to work VPN (dns failure)

I don't think there is any problem with the routing. I think pathping just gave up too quickly. Not all hops in a route will return any response, this does not indicate any problem. I had no problem pinging www.access.nottshc.nhs.uk. If I go to https://www.access.nottshc.nhs.uk I see a page titled "CISCO SSL VPN Service" with a message "Access is not permitted via this method."

Re: Very slow speeds and can't connect to work VPN (dns failure)

@ejs,As ever its always good to have another set of eyes on a problem... "there appears to be a routing problem" was intended to mean "there might be" As you state it is very slow which might give rise to the browser timing out the connection. The https:// connection is more than passing interest, it means there is noting responding on port 80, the usual 'target' for a web site.Interestingly when I tried to connect to that service (using https) I get the following "dangerous site" warning...

There is a problem with this website’s security certificate.

The security certificate presented by this website was not issued by a trusted certificate authority.Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to trick you or intercept any data you send to the server.

We recommend that you close this webpage and do not continue to this website.

Re: Very slow speeds and can't connect to work VPN (dns failure)

I forgot to mention the security warning. I clicked through the warnings, the security certificate was issued by "Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust Issuing CA (DMH)", which isn't known and trusted by all the certificates that come with your web browser (or operating system, depending on which web browser and operating system you use). Probably not a big issue, although adding the certificate might be part of the VPN first time setup.Perhaps nottshc.nhs.uk only resolves once connected to the VPN. I don't know the specific instructions or software provided.These forums shouldn't take 10 minutes to load. They are so old fashioned and simple I find they load faster than a big modern website. It may have been a one off, or if other websites are slow to load, suggests a general connection issue.